Create a listening query

Set up an alert that collects social posts mentioning the keywords you care about.

Before you start

• Listening depends on your plan. If your plan doesn't include it, you see an upgrade prompt when you open it.
• To listen on Facebook or LinkedIn, connect the Facebook Page or LinkedIn Page you want to monitor first. See Connect a social account.
• Choose up to 10 keywords, such as your brand name, product names and hashtags.

Open the feature

Choose Listening in the left sidebar. Under Alerts, click Set Up New Alerts (or the + button next to Alerts). The Set Up Alerts window opens.

Steps

1. Type a name in Title, up to 30 characters.
2. In Keywords/Tags, type each keyword and add a comma after it. You can add up to 10.
3. To skip posts with certain words, add them to Excluded Keywords the same way.
4. Open Sources and tick the networks to search, such as Instagram, YouTube, Reddit or BlueSky. Available sources are ticked for you; untick any you don't want.
5. If you ticked Facebook or LinkedIn, search for and select your Pages under Select Facebook Pages: or Select LinkedIn Pages:. You can pick up to 10 of each.
6. To leave out posts from your own accounts, tick Exclude content from my connected accounts.
7. Leave Date Range on Anytime, or pick dates to limit the results.
8. Click Save Settings.

Reconnect a source account

If the Listening sidebar shows the reconnect icon for a connected page, open it and complete the provider's authorization flow for that account. Return to the alert and check its state. Reconnecting access does not guarantee that previously missing mentions will be backfilled.

Expected result

The alert appears under Alerts with a loading spinner. Its mention list shows Collecting mentions… and the progress for each source. Results start to appear within a few minutes. For a new alert, Social Champ also collects posts from up to the last 30 days, where the source allows it.

Example

To track talk about your café, type "Bean Street" in Title. Add Bean Street, #BeanStreetCoffee and @beanstreet as keywords, and add jobs to Excluded Keywords to skip job ads. Open Sources, keep only Instagram and Reddit ticked, and click Save Settings. Within a few minutes, the first mentions appear under the alert.

Limits and permissions

Your alert shows the mentions collected within your plan's limit.

• Facebook and LinkedIn only collect activity on the Pages you select, not public posts across the whole network.
• Some sources, such as Threads, News & Web, TikTok and X (Twitter), and the Advanced query (optional) field may not be available on your account yet.
• The number of alerts and mentions you can collect depends on your plan. When your plan has a mention limit, Usage & Limits at the top of the Listening page shows how much you've used.
• With the Listening add-on, you can have up to 25 alerts and collect up to 100,000 mentions a month. Changing your subscription, such as adding team members or switching between monthly and yearly billing, keeps your alerts and mentions while the add-on stays active.
• If you lose all Listening access, including when an admin grant is removed without another entitlement, your alerts and mentions are kept but frozen. They disappear from Listening, and you can't open, change, report on or export them. They come back if you add Listening again within 90 days. After 90 days, they're deleted.
• Removing an admin grant keeps Listening available when your plan, paid add-on or another support grant still provides access. An explicit support disable freezes access even if an add-on or admin grant exists.
• Listening can't promise to find every public post. What it finds depends on each network.
• To change an alert later, click the gear icon next to its name. The Edit Alerts window has Save Settings and Delete.

Troubleshooting

• Save Settings is greyed out: hover over it to see why. You need a title, at least one keyword and at least one source. Facebook and LinkedIn also need at least one Page selected.
• You see "Connect a Facebook Page or remove Facebook from Sources.": click Connect account and connect the Page, or untick Facebook. The same applies to LinkedIn.
• You see "You're No Longer Collecting Alerts!": you've reached your plan's limit. Delete alerts you no longer need, or upgrade your plan.
• No mentions after collection finishes: you see Uh-oh!. Click Edit Mentions and try broader keywords or more sources.

Refine matching with an advanced query

When Advanced query (optional) is available, use AND, OR, NOT, quoted phrases and parentheses to refine matching. For example, (coffee OR espresso) AND "Bean Street" NOT jobs requires the phrase and one of the two drinks, and excludes jobs. Keep the terms you want collected in Keywords/Tags too: the advanced expression refines collected results and does not promise a broader search of the network.

With no advanced query, any included keyword can match, while excluded keywords remove matches. Matching is case-insensitive; quoted phrases match contiguous text. Close every quote and parenthesis. A rejected expression must be corrected before saving. You still need the required title, keywords and source selection. Excluded Keywords also accepts up to 10 entries; use each chip's remove button to replace an entry at the limit.

Manage an existing alert

Use the gear beside an alert to edit its title, keywords, exclusions, sources, selected Pages, connected-account exclusion and date window, then Save Settings. Review the source warning before saving: a selected Page source needs its connected account. Deleting an alert is separate from closing an individual mention; read the deletion confirmation before proceeding.

The sidebar's unread badge identifies newly collected results. Its spinner indicates initial collection or an update in progress. Use Show more to reveal additional alerts, and Last Fetched to understand how recently collection ran. A source marked Fetched has completed that collection attempt; another source can still be collecting or show a source-specific error. A completed attempt with no matches does not prove the search covered every post.

For threshold notifications, see Configure Listening notifications. These notifications are separate from scheduled PDF or PowerPoint reports.